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It's Fun to Play the Piano ... Please Pass It On!

Short answer, no. While i wouldn't play any piano with dirty hands, dry hands trump washed hands. It's a violin thing. Depending on the weather, it can take hours for my hands to dry completely. Also, this is not a public piano. Aren't escalator rails the nastiest things? Sorry for the OT.

Part of me it is habit. Getting into the piano playing mood, so to speak.

The other reason... in my student days I worked at a call center, luckily one of the better once. They took great pains to clean the computer keyboards and computer mice, due to studies about the transmission of illnesses at the work place. Those studies showed that between sharing a bathroom, sharing keyboard and computer mice and shaking hands, the most common way to catch a cold from somebody was to share keyboard and computer mice, then shake hands and sharing bathrooms came last.

So, a lot more than we like to think sticks to those things. That kinda stuck in my head. So the idea is basically to make sure there is as little as possible to leave behind before I touch the keys.

And yeah - it is also out of respect for the instrument....

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Currently working on: Venetian Gondola song by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy

I'm not in any other sense obsessed with cleanliness, but I am regarding the piano keyboard. I wash my hands before every practice session, and I wipe down the keys at least every other day.

Maybe I just have oily fingers, but I definitely notice an increased slipperiness on the black keys if I go even one day without cleaning the keys.

The fewer obstacles I have, the better!

I agree with FarmerJones, though, that when it comes to playing my stringed instrument, I'm much more sensitive to problems of wet hands than any issues about cleanliness. I hate to touch the strings on my bass -- or even the bow -- when my hands are wet.

I do wash my hands if I haven't done it recently. But that presents a problem, because during the winter time my hands get so dry that my fingertips are really slippery. So I wash my hands, put lotion on them and then end up washing them again because I don't want that on the keys

I never do unless my hands are truly dirty (working in the yard or on my cars etc.). But then, I'm the only one playing it.

When I worked for a school district once, a Science class swabbed various things in the buildings, analyzed the results and found that the computer lab keyboards were the filthiest things in the school. Interestingly enough, the bathroom facilities were among the cleanest, whatever that means. Maybe it means most people wash their hand there but not in the computer labs.

After that, all the computer teachers cleaned the keyboards with alcohol pads in between classes.

I guess if I had a piano studio or lots of people playing my piano, my priorities would change.

I throw my digital on the back of my pickup truck and then drive through the automatic car wash with the windows down so that I too get scrubbed along with the truck and piano - once a month, whether we all need it or not...

However, every time I play lately it's been "gurgling" loudly and making a lot of bubbles - just like the machines that Lawrence Welk used to use for his "champagne music" way back in the day on B&W TV...

I guess I'm going to have to start taking my leaf blower along to give it a blow-dry afterwards each time...good idea, huh? I'll bet that Disney's "Colors of the Wind" would sound great on it after that!

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Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on. Frederic Chopin